Traditional marketing is still a powerful marketing medium and email is still one of the best ways to get someones attention. The challenge for email is that it is much harder for it to be shared compared to new emerging low friction social marketing channels such as Facebook and Twitter. Many well optimized blogs including the biggest blog in the world Huffington Post (recently sold to Yahoo for over $300 million) understand this intimately and include options to content share by providing buttons throughout the site to “like” and “share” on Facebook and “retweet” on Twitter as well as email a friend.
Even Lady Gaga knows the power of Facebook and at 32 million fans she is leveraging the social web to make sure she is not forgotten. One of the tools in her marketing armory is FanBridge that integrates email with social marketing and provides a range of application sets to make it easy to create marketing campaigns and provide incentives for signups.
FanBridge is a “Fan Management” technology start up which provides an environment that allows you to build your Fan base by providing a platform that:
- Gets more Fans
- Excites Fans
- Keeps Fans Engaged
How does it do that?
Getting More Fans
- They start with your existing email list and will import it into the platform
- Provide fan customized signup forms that can be embedded into websites, Facebook or blogs
- Create incentives to join your list such as a free song, exclusive photo or even a video file (incentives are also automatically integrated into signup forms)
- Free custom simple microsite for informing fans
Excite You Fans
- Campaigns and Promotions can be created that turn interest into purchases with links directly to your point of sale sites
- Provides analytics that allows you to adjust your marketing campaign and keep them excited
- Tour calendars can be added be added to newsletters so fans don’t forget the important dates
- Integrate “best practice” viral marketing tactics such as contests and prizes
Keep Fans Engaged
- Email management tools including templates to make your emails looking good, targeting as well as unsubscribes, and bounces.
- Collection of mobile numbers from fans so you send last minute SMS messages as well as scheduling messages to automatically send in the future.
- Manage multiple social networks from one platform and track the effectiveness of each
At this stage the platform is primarily for musicians but there is nothing stopping this type of technology being applied to speakers, writers, filmmakers, sports people and teams in fact anyone with a fan base.
How could you apply this type of platform?
